The Permanent Collection at ICP contains more than 100,000 photographs. Since its opening in 1974, ICP has acquired important historical and contemporary images through a dedicated Acquisitions Committee and through generous donations and bequests from photographers and collectors. The collection spans the history of the photographic medium, from daguerreotypes to gelatin silver and digital chromogenic prints. At present approximately 20,500 records are online. More will be accessible during the course of 2011.

The ARTstor Digital Library provides more than a million digital images through internet accessible software designed for teaching and research. The collections comprise contributions from international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, artists and artists’ estates.

ARTstor serves educators, curators, librarians, and students at more than 1,350 institutions including the ICP. The ARTstor Digital Library is available by subscription through the ICP Library. The ICP has a site-wide license through the library and access is granted through the IP authentication anywhere onsite or through a membership remotely. The site licenses allow unlimited numbers of simultaneous users to access the Digital Library, both onsite and remotely.

For a subscription to ARTstor you can use remotely contact the ICP Library or stop in for a subscription and a tutorial.

Artsy Education and the ability to download open-access images. Artsy is a free website with a library of 50,000 images from 650 museum, nonprofit, and gallery partners, social media tools to facilitate gallery sales and institutional fundraising by providing free access to images. artsy.net/feature/artsy-education

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is one of the world’s largest libraries devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts and is Yale’s principal repository for literary archives, early manuscripts, and rare books. The Beinecke Library’s robust collections are used to create new scholarship by researchers from around the world. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University makes high-resolution images of the art in their collections available in the public domain atbeinecke.library.yale.edu/collections

Calisphere is the University of California’s free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 200,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere’s content has been selected from the libraries and museuams of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California. Calispherethe makes high-resolution images of the art in their collections available in the public domain atcalisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/

The Commons on Flickr shows images from public photography archives. This web site aims to make publicly held photographs and photography collections accessible to a wide audience. Photograph collections with “no known copyright restrictions” made available by various cultural institutions (Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and many others) and hosted by Flickr. Visitors are encouraged to participate in the project by adding tags to photos and by commenting on them so, your input and knowledge can help make these collections richer. Participating institutions include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the State Library of New South Wales, the Brooklyn Museum. flickr.com/commons

Corbis is a private Seattle based digital image service that provides photography, illustration, footage, typefaces and rights clearance services to its members who are, for the most part, online, magazines, newspaper, and television advertisers. corbisimages.com

The Getty is a great place to search for certain individual photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Gustave Le Ray, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Carlton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evens, Alfred Sander, Man Ray Paul Outerbridge, and Alvarez Bravo, as well as for photojournalism and social documentary photography. J. Paul Getty Museum makes high-resolution images of art in their collections available in the public domain getty.edu/art/. The Getty is also on flickr at flickr.com/gettyimages/.

George Eastman House images dates from the invention to the present day. Still photography collection subjects include everything from Mexican Daguerreotypes to Nineteenth Century Balloons. eastmanhouse.org/

LIFE cover featuring The Jackson Five with their mother & father Joseph & Katherine, John Olson. 1971. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. Accessed September 27, 2011. life.com

Some photographs from the LIFE photo archive, from the 1750s to today are now also available through Google. images.google.com/hosted/life

the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. They make high-resolution images of the art in their collections available in the public domainhttp://collections.lacma.org/

The Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs surveys the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present. The collection of more than 15,000 works is largely European and American, with some representation of other parts of the world, particularly Japan. metmuseum.org

The National Media Museum houses media items and artifacts of historical and cultural significance that as a whole track a technical history. Their online selection of includes media from The National Photography, National Cinematography, National Television and National New Media Collections. nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/Collection/Photography

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are a national art museum in Washington, D.C and open to the public and free of charge. The Gallery’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder. National Gallery of Art offers high-resolution images of art in their collections in the public domain.images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html

The New York Public Library is an excellent image resource.

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Rijksmuseum makes high-resolution images of art in their collections avaialable in the public domainrijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection

The Tibetan Collections at The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, a favorite of our own Matthew Carson, has made around 6,000 photographs spanning 30 years of Tibet’s history available online through The Tibet Album. tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk

I can neither confirm nor deny The Victoria and Albert Museum’s assertion of itself as the greatest museum of art and design in world because, I have not had the pleasure of having visited myself. But I can recommend their website as an excellent visual resource. My favorite aspect of the sight contains photographs described for blind and partially sighted visitors. collections.vam.ac.uk/

The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, presenting the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period to the present day. Together with the Reference Library, the Center’s collections of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts provide an exceptional resource for understanding the story of British art. Yale Center for British Art makes high-resolution images of art in their collections available in the public domain britishart.yale.edu/

The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting, African sculpture, and modern art. Yale University Art Gallery offers high-resolution images of art in their collections in the public domainartgallery.yale.edu/

Or go analog at The Picture Collection

Mid-Manhattan Library, 3nd floor

455 Fifth Avenue at 40th Street

212.340.0878 mmpic@nypl.org

The Picture Collection at the Mid-Manhattan Library is an encyclopedic visual resource arranged by subject. Subject folders contain clippings of illustrations from books, newspapers and magazines as well as photographs, prints and postcards from 1914-present. There is an entire file filled with a hundred years worth of images of broken objects. It is amazing!

Remember: Some of the images in the Digital Gallery may be subject to third party rights such as copyright and/or rights of privacy/publicity. Before using any of their images please review the specific digital library’s terms and conditions. To learn more about copyrights, visit:

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About Liz Sales

Liz Sales is cataloged as a bibliographic items with International Center of Photography Library. A bibliographic item can be any information entity (e.g., books, computer files, graphics, realia, cartographic materials, or in Liz's case, Liz) that is considered library material as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the patrons of the library in question. Liz is the only human being recognized by the Library of Congress as a library holding and has an assigned Library of Congress and ISBN #. While she cannot always be found at the library, she is a permanent part of the collection. For more information about Liz look up her library record at either http://www.worldcat.org/ or http://www.icp.org/research-center/library.